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Apple rocks with iTunes 9, iTunes Store improvements

Apple lays out a new version of iTunes and its vision for the album in the …

Steve Jobs took the stage today at Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco, and was joined by SVP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller and VP of iTunes engineering Jeff Robin to announce a number of new music-related products. In addition to new iPods, Jobs also unveiled iTunes 9, which sports a number of refined syncing options and automatic Genius playlists. The updated iTunes also supports some new refinements to the iTunes store itself, including new iPhone ringtones, the rumored iTunes LP format (aka Cocktail), iTunes Extras for movies, and a refined store organization.

Jobs kicked off the event by making a brief statement about his recent liver transplant. Jobs received the liver of a 20-something who had died in a car crash, and had elected to donate his organs. "I wouldn't be here without such generosity, so I hope all of us can be as generous and elect to become organ donors," Jobs told the crowd. But, he said, "I'm vertical, back at Apple, loving every day of it, getting to work with incredibly talented teams to work with some great new products."

A big part of that presentation concerned iTunes 9. The revamping of Apple's all-in-one media organizing, syncing, and playing app includes a number of refinements. An improvement based on iTunes 8's Genius feature, iTunes 9 can now create automatic Genius playlists. "Imagine a 'genius DJ' that plays endless mixes of songs from your iTunes library that go great together, almost like radio stations," Jobs said. iTunes can now make 12 of them by analyzing your library.

iTunes 9 iPhone app organization

iTunes also gets a variety of improved syncing features. You can now sync music by genre or artist (instead of making Smart playlists to do so, a tedious process if you have a large library); sync photos by album, faces, or events; or sync movies by several criteria. "I want the latest 3 movies that I bought, but I always want Ratatouille," Jobs explained. The most sought-after syncing feature, though, is a built-in way to organize iPhone apps right in iTunes. Apps can be arranged by genre, sorted onto separate screens, and even entire screens can be re-arranged right in iTunes. The whole arrangement can then sync to your iPhone or iPod touch.

iTunes 9 also supports a number of new features of the redesigned iTunes Store. The store has been reorganized to be much cleaner, with better navigation. There are new pages for artists, TV shows, movies, etc. It also includes easier access to previews inline in lists, which appear to be powered by WebKit's support of HTML5's audio and video tags.

In addition to the store refinement, there are two major new content formats: iTunes LP and iTunes Extras. iTunes LP, the result of the "Cocktail" project, gives album buyers access to a variety of additional content, including animated, synced lyrics, liner notes, performance videos, discography information, and more. iTunes LP is described like "DVD extras for music," but Apple isn't ignoring its video content, either. iTunes Extras will include similar content for movies as well, like behind-the-scenes footage and other supplementary content.

Finally, iTunes 9 introduces a number of additional sharing features. In particular, the Home Sharing feature lets a user share purchased content with up to five computers. Beyond streaming, tracks and video can be copied among approved computers, and can even be configured to automatically sync content to different machines. As rumored, iTunes will also allow you to post updates to Twitter or Facebook about songs or movies you are watching. And, also as rumored, iTunes has a new library of 30,000 pre-made ringtones for the iPhone.

In all, the changes to iTunes and the iTunes Store are welcome ones. Steve Jobs called iTunes 9 "the biggest release of iTunes in a long time." No word yet if the app is updated with full 64-bit Snow Leopard support, but we'll be sure to look into that with the download is available later today.